Thursday, February 3, 2011

I want to talk about lucid dreams, and whether or not they are real. Let us start off with the definition of lucid dreaming; most would define lucid dreaming as becoming aware in a dream in which what you are experiencing is not real. I do not believe that is what lucid dreaming actually is, but rather I believe that lucid dreaming is becoming aware in the dream that what you are experiencing is your own manifestation. Skeptics would probably come back to me and tell me that that definition outright proves that dreams are not real, because if you are manifesting it yourself, then how can it be real? But of course, if anyone is familiar with quantum physics, it is the exact same thing. Quantum physics has successfully theorized that in our day-to-day life we create and manifest what we are seeing through conscious observation. This is a generally accepted scientific theory; therefore, if you consider our dreams to not be real because we are creating them, then you must accept that our waking life is also not real. So, with the evidence I have presented so far, we must all accept that either our waking life and our dream state are both "unreal," or that our waking life and our dream state are both "real." Like I said, with the evidence I presented there is no distinguishing between the two.

It's funny because our ancestors once believed our waking life was also a dream. There are so many myths that show our ancestors did not think our waking life was real. Maybe none of this is real? Maybe everything is just a dream. However, it is not as simple as that. What does it mean for something to be a dream? Does it automatically demote it to 'not real?' Not necessarily, and this is the point that I'm trying to get at. We need to try to define the term 'real.' But before I do, let us discuss the science around perception, and our perception of waking life. If anyone has done any research about perception, he or she will know that everything we are seeing is actually just a construct of the brain. We don't actually see with our eyes, we see with our brain. So, everything we perceive is our mind's take on what is actually out there. It is not what actually is out there, though. Once we are in our bodies, we are stuck in them. We can never actually leave them. There is no way of getting out (well, there arguably is, if you believe in OBEs [Out of Body Experiences], but let us not go there, because that is another topic). So, we have to accept that in our current scientific scope of knowledge, we are stuck within our bodies, and we cannot get out of them. So, like I said, everything we perceive is merely our brains take on what is actually out there, but it's not truly out there. To put it simply, everything we see and experience is actually happening within ourselves, not without. An easy way to prove to yourself that what we see is an edited view of reality is to realize that we only see a very small percentage of what actually is out there. Some of the things we don't see are radio waves, micro waves, ultraviolet rays, gamma rays, etc. These are all 'proven scientific fact,' so, irrefutably, we are seeing an edited view of reality that is actually occurring within the brain, not outside of ourselves. So, once this begins to sink in, we have to accept that our waking life is in fact an illusion of the mind.

What exactly is real, then? Let us try to define real first. I first thought of the definition of 'real' being 'something that is tangible, and solid.' If that is your definition of real, then certainly your waking life is not real, as per the fact that you only perceive objects in your mind. As quantum physics has proven to us, everything we perceive in our waking life through our eyes actually isn't the object, but is an image of it rendered by our brains. Everything we might touch may feel solid to us, but it's just another illusion of the mind. Everything in the universe is pretty much empty. I cannot remember the exact percentage, but it is about 99% of everything in the universe that is just empty space. My second attempt at the definition of real is 'something that awakes a strong emotion within us.' By that definition, you then must define your dreams as reality, as well. Undeniably, we all experienced very intense emotions within our dreams. So, with the evidence I presented, either both dreams and reality are real, or both dreams and reality are not real. Finally, my third thought on the definition of what 'real' is, is that 'real is a constant; a running constant.' Now, this actually does seem like more of a better definition of reality, because reality seems more coherent/cohesive compared to our dreams. However, is the constant we experience in waking life really enough to demote dreams as unreal?

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

The reason why I decided to even record my dreams is because of a peculiar dream I had a while ago, I was taking a nap during a regular boring day and the next thing I realize is that I'm on the moon. Dreams are random, I know... but this felt so weird. I'm sure I had this dream because I've been studying dark holes and general astronomy for a while because I love astronomy. But I had a terrifying dream about a black hole that devoured our planet Earth. Anyways, I'll continue with my dream! I was on the moon, and a black hole was in our solar system that ruined the rotation of the moon around the Earth, so the black hole caused the moon to crash into Earth. I didn't wake up from dying though, it's odd because in dreams you wake up from death. (I'll use a term that was used in the movie "Inception") I was in a state of limbo, where I was in a place of nothingness for a while... I sat in the dark alone, hearing the static sound of the universe. When I was in this state of limbo, I wasn't scared or depressed because I was alone, I was depressed because I lost the people I loved. I wake up after that, jump out of my bed and ran to check if my family is there.(The dream was quite realistic, I had to make sure I was dreaming. :P) I learned something from the dream that I didn't know about myself, I learned how much I actually love my family. The things I learned from a single dream were massive, I figured if I started remembering them all I could learn a lot about myself, and others.

So that's pretty much my story, haha. :)

- Smaller version of the wallpaper :)

And this is the sound I heard when I was in the nothingness(not really, but kind of)